Balance
18 posts

Permalink

Listening to "When things fall apart," while walking to Yoga in the sunny morning streets of Chiang Mai, feels completely right. Everything is falling apart, yes, but I'm told it's also exactly how it should be. I can't disagree given my surroundings.

Even here where sun beams pour out of the sky and people's faces, reality has a way of finding me. Even here, where my soul is happier than it has ever been, reality comes knocking with reminders of humanity and death and illness and impermanence. Continue...

Permalink

My son and I started this bedtime meditation together when he was in third grade. 

It was a day he said the whole class got in trouble. Apparently some of the boys were playing with the soap in the bathroom. My son is sensitive, and being the kid who hates to piss off anyone, felt targeted by this lecture. (Apples and Trees, y'all.) He said his teacher was angry and looking right at him but then, my young son explained in air quotes, “chuckled” and was a little nicer.  Continue...

Permalink

40 is about accepting the blame

One morning when my 8year old was in a heap over the horrid inevitability that he would have to go to school again that day, he spat out, “You don’t do anything right! You promised I could skip school and you’re always lying!” It took me a minute to recover. I most certainly was not always lying but to explain this to him right now wasn’t going to get us any closer to him putting on his shoes. That I never ‘promised’ him he could skip school this particular day, wasn’t a discussion point, either. The facts of what I had said, the truth, was we discussed a time we may be traveling and, like the friends he’s so jealous of who get to miss school because they have a plane to catch, we would likely have that experience one day, too. But that was not what he wanted to hear or what he remembered that foggy, dark morning thirty minutes before the first school bell.  Continue...

Permalink

Teachers or parents who work with, or have, pre-schoolers and Kindergartners use the term “Inside Voice.” It’s a vocabulary word you don’t normally hear at a business meeting where other terms like “Synergy" or "Tech Disruption” get tossed out as if they had actual meaning. Nobody ever says, “Let’s use our Inside Voices.” Although I think they probably should.

Parents and Teachers use this word, ironically, loudly in order to tell the child to stop yelling in the store/house/meeting/car/market/coffee shop. “USE YOUR INSIDE VOICE,” I may or may not have been caught yelling at the three year old who was singing Baby Beluga at Top Volume.  Continue...

Permalink

Over a year ago, I started talking to someone about ADHD. I joined a group of other women and we talked about what it was like living with distraction, children, jobs, husbands, and the constant 32 TV monitors playing different channels in our heads.

One of the themes that started cropping up was the idea of mindfulness. Mindfulness, or the awareness of your thoughts and living in the present tense, has been shown to decrease ADHD symptoms. Meditation, it’s practical companion, has been shown to help cancer and diabetes, fix marriages, and save the planet from impending astroids.* Continue...

Permalink

I wonder if my children will remember me as constant motion. Not a specific task, like cleaning their rooms while we talk about their day, or how I make dinner when we discuss their homework, or the laundry that I’m constantly walking up and down with from room to laundry and back. No, more like a blur of my historic self, a gusian filter placed over the presence of me in their memories.

Like my own mother is to me in my childhood; Always moving: a presence, a tickle monster, a card player, a disciplinarian. She is a blur of the eighties, a wisp of the nineties. Continue...

Permalink

“You walk very fast.” I hear the words at the same time a wet nose bumps my calves. I turn to find an older woman walking on the trail next to me. I had slowed down to text a friend briefly when she unexpectedly popped in to my path during my walk. She smiles, “I wasn’t able to catch you until now. It’s why I said something. Usually I’m way ahead of everyone but you walk as quickly as I do.”

We enjoy a nice chat as I pace along side her. I explain that I used to run but now walk because of my bad knees. She confesses she used to run marathons and was unsure about this walking business but really enjoys it. We both agree we can’t run to save our lives now and not ironically, that’s when she asks if I’ve seen the coyotes. We both agree perhaps we should carry pepper spray. Continue...

Permalink

Hello! Salutations! How are you, anyhow?

It’s been a while and I’ve missed you all. Continue...

Permalink

I find myself on the matt, rushed from traffic, breathless from worry. The room dims, the instructor’s voice soothes the atoms in the air. We breathe.

The class begins and we stretch, bending over yesterday’s beers and middle-age. We look up, grasping at the sky energy. We stand tall, then lean low, we breathe heavily. Continue...

Permalink

“Um, do you have sage?” I ask at Whole Foods. It seems logical that if one would need something to cleanse spirits, Whole Foods would have it.

You know: Hippies and all that. Continue...